London —
Spain's LNG sendout rose by more than 5 million cu m on the day Tuesday with gas-to-power demand rising to meet the shortfall as the unplanned outage at the 1 GW Asco 2 nuclear reactor brought total Spanish nuclear output down to 4 GW.

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Asco 2 is not expected to return until Thursday and gas-to-power demand expected to be even higher Wednesday given lower wind output.

Gas-to-power demand rose to 17.1 million cu m Tuesday from 13.3 million cu m Monday to meet the gap in the power generation mix, according to S&P Global Analytics data.

The increase in gas-to-power demand was met by higher LNG sendouts which rose to 39.2 million cu m Tuesday from 33.7 million Monday, reducing also French flow from 2.6 million cu m to 1.0 million cu m during the same period.

Red Electrica de Espana data shows that nuclear output was at 4 GW Wednesday as Asco 2 was still offline Wednesday at 3:15 pm local time, with gas-fired generation seen at 4.5 GW after being at 3 GW early in the day. This is higher than Tuesday output which ranged from 2.4 GW to 4.2 GW.

Entso-e transparency data shows the outage is set to last until the early hours of Thursday.

"The reactor [Asco 2] has once again been removed from the grid to enable work to be carried out," nuclear security association CSN said. "The reactor was ramping up when the irregularity was detected in the module, which needs to be corrected during an outage."